Il sogno dell'architetto

In 1839 an architect named Ithiel Town, who had helped bring Greek and Gothic revival buildings to America, asked Thomas Cole to paint him a view of Athens. Cole had never been to Athens and did not want to fake it, so he gave Town something else. He built an impossible skyline that runs through 4,000 years of building at once, an Egyptian temple, a Greek colonnade, a Roman aqueduct, and a Gothic cathedral, with a tiny figure, the architect, reclining on top of a column stack of books to survey it all. Cole used the light to sort them out. The Greek and Roman stone sits in clear sunshine while the medieval cathedral is pushed into shadow. Town refused to accept it, complaining it was too purely architectural, so it stayed in Cole's family, unsold, and you can still read the dedication to I. Town inscribed on the painting.